The doctor often thinks of the five people on the beds as explorers; the laboratory a ship; the sea the cosmologically vast configuration space of the brain's genetic regulatory networks; their task to find a way between the place where the human mind struggles now and a brighter place where it might truly flourish; his, to keep them alive until they do. They have been stuck mid-way for months (the doctor hopes it's mid-way) in an inner landscape no human had or could behold or survive. They are kept alive by the doctor's ceaselessly creative work just as much as by the restraints preventing them from hurting themselves while the retroviral optimization engines seeks a new and stranger attractor for their brains.
There's something beyond pain and terror in their screaming, something like a plea or a warning. With the patience of a naturalist collating reports from an unexplored wilderness the doctor maps every scrap of perhaps-language onto a shade or an angle he's too human to understand. There's no shortage of material: there's more than one room in the laboratory and nobody in them ever sleeps.
(Originally posted on my blog.)